In the still, frosty nights at the start of the second week of January, Britain came closer than at any time in recent years to running out of electricity.
On Wednesday evening, (8th January) peak demand came within 580 MW (around 1 per cent of total demand) of overwhelming the available generation capacity. This would have forced the grid to impose emergency constraints on demand, which would have been experienced by at least some people as a blackout.
The National Energy System Operator (NESO), the body which runs the national electricity grid, managed to squeeze through on this occasion. But it will not be the last time this winter that its nerves will be tested, let alone in the years ahead.
This situation has come about as a result of older fossil fuel assets being taken offline, while the new capacity being added to the grid has mainly been intermittent, weather-based renewable generation. Under Ed Miliband’s plans, this process will be accelerated dramatically in the run up to 2030, by which time the Government hopes that 95 per cent of the country’s power generation will come from low-carbon sources. The government is not planning a massive expansion of nuclear power in the next five years, so this means that Britain’s power generation will be made up primarily from sources that can simply stop at any time, at the whim of nature.
I wrote back in October about the sobering thought that many members of Britain’s non-technical elite don’t understand the principle of balancing an electricity grid — the fact that the power which the nation consumes must be balanced by what is being produced, in real time. Given the enormity of the changes being planned, this is a concept about which the whole nation will be getting an unwelcome education in the near future. Yet despite last Wednesday’s near miss, much of the public still seems to be insulated from the fundamental change that is planned in the way that electricity is going to be created.
In this, Ed Miliband has been aided immeasurably by the fact that many of these plans had already been laid down by the Conservatives, and especially by Boris Johnson’s government. Not only the Net Zero plans themselves, but also bans on petrol and diesel cars, and rules encouraging heat pumps. Johnson announced a lot of these ideas for the purpose of political signalling; like a can he was dropping on the floor, to be kicked down the road by the uninterrupted Tory governments he saw stretching out in front of him for years to come, back in 2019. But what Boris had intended merely as an ephemeral political counterweight to Brexit, Miliband now plans in deadly earnest.
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